Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
I don’t think that the Rats are an offshoot of the Skeptics and New Atheists just a space which competed for the same young, male, educated, Autistic Anglo audience. They deliberately removed the parts of the skeptic curriculum which involve introspection and ethnography, because they all wanted to run some grift on their audiences so the audiences needed poor epistemic hygiene.
Looking at the people who believe IQ is magic, billionaires are gods, and that you should freeze your head. These people are skeptics.
The overlap between rationalists and the skeptic community was indeed tiny. I say this as someone heavily involved in Usenet skeptic communities since the late eighties. In fact the Bay Area doesn’t even register as a locus of the skeptic community at the times he’s talking about.
I’m not trying to excuse what much of the skeptic/atheist community later became in the 2010s. It’s definitely turned into something nearly unrecognizable since its earlier days. But that had nothing to do with any sort of imagined rationalist adjacency.